How to Find Joy in the Bible
To the Editors:
The faith of your Bible believers [Dec. 30] is the opposite of biblical faith. Biblical faith centers on the gift of grace, asks for adventure and is to be freely enjoyed and shared. TIME'S Bible believers count "a literal biblical faith" to be "a badge of honor," are driven by a need for "spiritual security," and pride themselves on being hardliners, splitters of congregations, book burners in Kanawha County, censors in California.
The Bible always solicits faith in God, never in itself. It does not claim for itself inerrancy, which is the invention of these Bible believers. So what does it solve for them? Subscribers to domino theories, they worry about giving something up and seeing everything topple, instead of looking for an increase of faith and hope and love. TIME says that they are reacting to rationalism, but you show them being rationalistic, deciding in advance and on philosophical grounds what kind of Bible they are going to allow their God to use. Instead of basking in their sense of being grasped, they nervously watch the odds on the Bible being true or the percentage of it that is true, as these odds constantly change on a tote board that is dependent on archaeologists and historians.
The grand themes found in the Bible throughout church history are missing: the power and love of God, the high-risk gift of Christ, the Holy Spirit's promise of hope. The current episode of regress will pass. Fortunately, TIME tells us that there is a surge of Bible reading. I hope it leads to what Samuel Sandmel calls The Enjoyment of Scripture. In TIME'S article, few seem to be enjoying much of anything.
Martin Marty Chicago
Dr. Marty, a Lutheran, is author of The Fire We Can Light and teaches church history at the University of Chicago.
How incongruous: a Christmas issue focusing on our fisticuffs over whether the Bible is human or divine, when the whole nativity scene shows so eloquently that God has become fully human—diapers, crib and all. The manger story means that the divine speaks only through the human. So what is all the fuss about?
I suspect that our society's flight from the Bible arises from the fact that its message makes us squirm—especially those parts about God's siding with the poor, the inept and the outcast. Proud, rich nations do not want to hear about camels and needles' eyes, suffering servants or crucified kings, but the Bible is a part of us. It lives in our language, our mental imagery and above all in our conscience, whether we like it or not.
The scholarly sophisticates analyze its sources or reduce it to "religious literature," somehow managing to avoid its discomfiting demands. The fundamentalists smugly laud its inerrancy about talking snakes and whales' bellies while they continue to lay up treasures on earth and trample the needy for a pair of shoes.
The Bible is basically a drama and we are all in it. When the author appears onstage after the last scene, he will not ask whether you believed it or whether you analyzed it. He will ask whether you did it.
Harvey Cox
Cambridge, Mass.
The writer, a Baptist, is professor of divinity at Harvard and author of The Secular City.